When a plastic surgery practice opens Keyword Planner for the first time, the biggest numbers pull hardest. In Dallas-Fort Worth, "bbl" has about 9,900 searches a month. "Rhinoplasty" has 2,900. "Breast augmentation" and "tummy tuck" have 2,400 each. It is tempting to point the first dollars of a new account straight at them.
That is usually the most expensive way to start. Most of those people are months away from a consult, and the searches that belong to patients ready to choose a surgeon look much smaller on paper. This chapter is about starting with the small, valuable searches, protecting them, and only then going after the rest.
9,900 People Search "BBL" Every Month. About 140 Add "Dallas."
Put the generic searches next to their local versions and the pattern jumps out:
- "bbl" about 9,900 a month; "bbl dallas" about 140.
- "rhinoplasty" about 2,900; "rhinoplasty dallas" about 390.
- "breast augmentation" about 2,400; "breast augmentation dallas" about 720.
- "tummy tuck" about 2,400; "tummy tuck dallas" about 390.
Someone typing "bbl" might be curious, comparing risks, watching a friend's recovery, or years away from surgery. Someone typing "bbl dallas" is looking for a surgeon in their city. The second search is a fraction of the size of the first and worth far more per click, because it comes from a patient much closer to a consult.
Chapter 2 mapped those stages. This chapter turns them into campaigns.
Two Campaigns, Two Jobs
We build every new plastic surgery account around two campaigns with very different jobs. The names are ours, not Google's.
The Isolation campaign holds the searches you already know will produce consult requests: the procedure plus a city, the procedure plus "near me," the surgeon-in-my-area searches. It uses exact match, so an ad shows only for that search and close variants of it, and manual bids, so you decide what each search is worth. Its job is to win the searches that pay, reliably, from the first week.
The Exploration campaign comes later. It uses broad match, which lets Google show your ads for searches you never listed, and it bids automatically toward a target cost per consult request. Its job is to find the long tail: the thousands of specific, unpredictable searches that patients type and no keyword tool will show you in advance.
The order matters. Isolation gives the account clean, reliable conversions. Exploration needs those conversions to learn what a good patient looks like. Launch them in the other order and broad match spends its first months guessing.
The Isolation Launch List for a Dallas Practice
Here is what a starting Isolation list could look like for a Dallas practice, built from Keyword Planner's Dallas-Fort Worth data:
- General: "plastic surgery dallas" (about 1,600 a month) and "plastic surgeon dallas tx" (about 590).
- Breast augmentation: "breast augmentation dallas" (about 720), "breast augmentation near me" (about 320) and "breast augmentation fort worth" (about 320).
- Tummy tuck: "tummy tuck dallas" (about 390) and "tummy tuck near me" (about 170).
- Liposuction: "liposuction dallas" (about 390) and "lipo near me" (about 320).
- Rhinoplasty: "rhinoplasty dallas" (about 390) and "nose job in dallas" (about 390).
- Mommy makeover: "mommy makeover dallas" (about 260).
- BBL: "bbl dallas" and "bbl near me" (about 140 each).
Each procedure becomes its own small ad group, with ads written for it and a link to its own page, the structure from Chapter 4. Build every keyword in all three match types from the start, but switch on only the exact-match versions. The others wait, already built, for the day the account is ready for them.
Two searches on a Dallas list deserve a second look before they go live. "Plastic surgeons for breast augmentation" showed a top-of-page bid range of roughly $12 to $55, far above its neighbors. Before bidding on it, run it through the Chapter 3 math and make sure a breast augmentation patient can pay for clicks at that price. And "fort worth plastic surgery" is also the name of a Fort Worth practice, so some of those searches are people looking for that practice. Watch what those clicks turn into before you bid hard on it.
Your Surgeons' Names Are the Cheapest Clicks You Will Buy
One more campaign launches on the first day: a brand campaign for your practice's name and your surgeons' names.
People searching your name have already chosen you, or nearly. They are the most likely patients in the account to request a consult, and nothing stops a competitor from bidding on your name. A small brand campaign keeps you at the top of your own results for very little money.
Include the searches patients build around your name, not just the name itself. People who are close to booking search a surgeon's name with "reviews," with "before and after," with "cost" and with the procedure they want. Each of those is someone checking you out one last time, and each belongs in the brand campaign where your ad can answer them first.
Keeping those searches in their own campaign also keeps your numbers honest. Brand searches convert so well that, mixed into everything else, they make the rest of the account look better than it is. Separated, you can see exactly what your non-brand searches are doing.
Exploration Waits for About 30 Consult Requests a Month
The signal to start Exploration is volume: roughly 30 consult requests and qualified calls a month coming out of Isolation, counted the Chapter 1 way.
That number is not arbitrary. Automated bidding learns from conversions. With a handful a month, it has too little to learn from and spends while it guesses. With about 30, it has a pattern to follow.
When the account gets there:
- Copy the Isolation campaign.
- Keep only the three to five keywords that have produced the most consult requests.
- Switch them to broad match.
- Set bidding to Maximize Conversions with a target cost per conversion, based on what Isolation has actually been paying for a consult request, not on a guess.
Give it a month or two. The first weeks are learning time, and the target cost per conversion is what keeps that learning from getting expensive.
What does Exploration find that a list would miss? The Dallas data gives a feel for it. Among the searches Keyword Planner surfaced were "natural looking breast implants" (about 170 a month), "eyelid surgery for asian eyes" (about 170), "breast reduction with lift" (about 140) and "fat transfer to face" (about 140). None of them are obvious enough to make a starting list, and each comes from someone with a specific idea of what they want. Multiply that by thousands of phrasings, many too small to show up in any keyword tool at all, and you have the part of the market only broad match can reach.
That is also why Exploration is where most accounts eventually grow. Isolation is capped by the searches you can name. Exploration is capped only by your budget and your negative keyword list.
Smaller practices may take a while to reach 30 a month, and that is fine. Isolation can carry an account on its own for a long time, and Exploration launched too early costs more than it finds.
Read the Search Terms Every Day for the First Month
Broad match finds new searches. It also finds searches you will never want. For the first 30 days of Exploration, read the search terms report every day and act on what you see.
The Dallas research gives a good preview of what shows up:
- Exclude: other practices and surgeons by name, other cities, medical tourism ("plastic surgery mexico"), "gone wrong" searches and job seekers. Add each as a negative keyword the day you see it.
- Keep: the slang. "Nose job" and "boob job" searches are patients, and as Chapter 5 showed, a careless negative can block them.
- Decide: non-surgical searches like Botox, filler and CoolSculpting. Broad match will wander into them because they sit so close to surgery. Unless your plan says otherwise, they belong in their own campaign, not this one.
Keep a running list of every negative you add and why, so the next person to work on the account understands the decisions. After the first month, the report still needs reading, just less often. A plastic surgery account running broad match with a target cost per conversion is never finished with its negative keyword list.
Isolation and Exploration Trade Places Over Time
Once Exploration is established, the two campaigns start to balance each other.
Exploration often grows into the larger campaign, because it can reach far more searches. As it proves it can win the ready-to-book searches at a good cost, some practices pause parts of Isolation and let Exploration carry them. When a specific search slips, when a competitor starts outbidding you on "breast augmentation dallas," for example, Isolation can be switched back on to reclaim that position with a bid you control.
Neither campaign is permanent in its current form. Together they let you protect what you know and keep finding what you don't.
Next: Bid to Profit
Choosing the right searches is half of the job. The other half is paying the right amount for them. Chapter 7 covers bidding: how to set manual bids in Isolation, what to watch in the first weeks, and how to turn Isolation's real costs into Exploration's target.
The full chapter list is on the Google Ads for Plastic Surgeons home page.
This is the order we launch every plastic surgery account in, Isolation and brand first, Exploration once it has earned it, and it is how our Google Ads management works. If you are building your own, start with the city and near-me searches for the one procedure your practice most wants to grow.
